LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

Power outages during snow storms are not fun. While power has been restored (for now?), the following handwritten bit of blogging is posted as an attached PDF talking about format diversification.

Story in the NYT Jan 20, 2010 - Chilled by Choice

Story in the NYT Dec 26, 2008 - No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses’

After reading both stories some might think that you can be warm and environmentally conscious at the same time.

Our indoor/outdoor tomcat is having problems. We had to rearrange things. Since I got back from the day job, the cat has been spastic. He's been far more expressive than normal with fairly strange physical antics. Here's what happened.

The space here on the farm where we record LISTen suffered some structural damage recently. I had a spaghetti pot catching the leak as water dripped down from the ceiling of that space. We just had a damage assessment that indicates that that whole space is going to have to be repaired. Before I had to shuffle off to the day job I worked with family to tear out that whole area and reconfigure another part of the farm house to compensate for the loss of space.

This truly sucks. I was worried that I was going to have to negotiate time to borrow somebody else's recording space to record the next episode. I was even more worried the podcast would be forced back into hiatus until I could figure out a solution.

After all that worry, I am pleased to say that we're still on the air barring any unforeseen complications. The acoustics profile has changed so things might sound slightly different. Listener discretion is encouraged.

Sometimes I actually do do non-librarian things. This blog post talks about one of those projects. More about that project can be found at a certain site too.

What's In a Name Part I.

My PICAW (Partner In Crime At Work) and myself found ourselves bored at work when we were covering the phones.
I randomly searched for unique names in our patron database and was quite surprised what names (first and middle) popped up. So what started out as a way to pass the time turned into a competitive game.

Our list became quite extensive and we have tried to keep it organized, somewhat...

States:

Florida

Georgia

Illinois

Indiana

Louisiana

Maine

Maryland

Montana

Nevada

Virginia

Washington

We found out that our library system has its own "United Nations" of patrons' names when it came to countries along with some other cities.

Countries and Cities:

Africa

America

Antigua

Argentina

Asia

Austria

Bari

Benin

Bolivia

Brazil

Burma

Canada

Chad

China

Cuba

Denmark

Dominica

Egypt

England

Eritrea

Ethiopia

France

India

Iran

Ireland

Israel

Italia

Jordan

Kenya

Mali

Manila

Milan

Niger

Oman

Paris

Romania

Rome

Somalia

Spain

Sudan

Tonga

This provokes some thought when it comes to the testing of theories and how generalizing from the part in lieu of the whole creates issues:

From The New York Times:

It was a year for birthers, deathers and Tenthers to go all nine-iron on the Obama brand.

Catchphrases and buzzwords can tell us much about a year past — what resonated, what stuck, what the year revealed about the sensibility of the nation, whether you’re a wise Latina woman, a mini-Madoff, a teabagger or Balloon Boy.

Who knew there could be a word for a mother of eight?

The laundry room-cum-library at 169 East 69th Street. Tenants in the building have elevated the urban use of apartment house basements as informal recycling centers into a high art.

Full article in the New York Times

Do taxpayers subsidize well-off students in California?

Opinion piece in the NYT